Our Technology Focus

As a small consultancy, we focus very strongly on delivering the key technology areas our clients demand. Every time an Achean consultant arrives at your organisation you are welcoming an expert on board who will deliver the results you have engaged Achean for. We do not carry the baggage that larger consultancies encumber you with; baggage like trainees, non-experts and sales vice presidents looking for their next commission.

We specialise in technology. We augment that very strong focus with awareness of the business environment we operate in. Technology exists to fulfill a function; that function is to facilitate your business.

The kinds of business we engage with know that their success depends on their data, their use of that data in their applications and on the infrastructure that supports those applications. They are also aware that, in a world changed very rapidly by the emergence of cloud computing, a guide like Achean is invaluable.

Applications

The business applications your organisation deploys are the embodiment of the processes it operates by. These applications must be available the whole time your business operates. They are at the highest level in the value chain of all the systems you deploy. Securing the continued presentation of your applications to the user is a critical function.

At Achean, we believe applications should live in the data centre and be presented through a web browser to the user. We are strong advocates of using Java application servers to do this. We have solid experience of deploying many application servers into production environments. Application servers such as Apache Tomcat, Oracle Application Server, Glassfish as well as deploying applications onto cloud based services. Cloud based application servers are undergoing a period of massive investment from suppliers such as Google, Amazon, VMWare and Red Hat. With a pricing model that’s based around usage, the advantages to business are clear.

Data

Your data describes every detail of your business. Every customer, every invoice, every shipment or download. Safe guarding your data not only protects your business, it’s also a legal requirement. Keeping data in an inaccessible vault is not an option. It must be available when, and where required.

Achean has a very strong record of delivery on data projects. Designing and delivering flexible, high performance, resilient data storage systems using a variety of relational database products, such as Oracle, MySQL and Postgresql is a key area we consult on.

There is a new class of data storage products emerging, especially where cloud based infrastructure is the norm. NoSQL databases can bring great advantages for performance in very large data sets but often at the cost of flexibly accessing data. We can advise when and when not to adopt this new storage paradigm.

Making data from one system available in another through interfaces designed using Java or internal database methods is another key strength and the subject of a case study under Projects.

Infrastructure

Applications and the data presented through those application are critical to your business. Underpinning data and application is a critical infrastructure.

We are expert at designing core infrastructure to be highly available, fault tolerant and deploying into mission critical functions. We have overseen VMWare, Solaris, Linux and BSD based deployments and configured clustering for major clients seeking 24/7 operational systems. Here too, cloud based infrastructure is massively changing the way infrastructure is regarded. Increasingly, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is seen as preferable to on-premise servers due to advantageous pricing models and the facility to hand off maintenance of hardware to the cloud vendor.

As attractive as IaaS may seem, an Amazon service outage in April 2011 took many businesses offline for several days (none were clients of Achean). Cloud based infrastructure can still be vulnerable. The lessons of the Amazon outage have been learned, and Achean can advise on how the Amazon customers who were unaffected managed their deployments and continued business as normal.